Abstract

This lecture explores the boundaries between audiences and actors, and what happens when audiences interact with actors and their characters. Its illustrative case is Desdemona's response to Othello. When Desdemona marries Othello she crosses the boundary from audience world to the world of fiction. In so doing, she initiates a structure in which things that should be kept separate merge: genre, language, characters, plots. The mergings are consistently coded as theatrical: this is a tragedy of theatre boundaries gone wrong. Psychologist Edward Bullough's argument from 1912 about distance in the theatre provides the theoretical framework for this lecture to explore the problems when audiences do not keep stage.